Rent-to-Own

RTO: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow by Ed Winn III

 

Non-Compete Agreements: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by Ed Winn III

 

Workplace Violence: Is it a Real Threat? by Kent Sutherland

 

RTO: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
By Ed Winn III

There is an old French aphorism which, loosely translated, reads, "The more things change, the more things stay the same." At the millennium, it is worth a look back and a look forward to see what has changed and what might change in the future for the rental industry. Going back 20 years, there was no trade association and there were only a handful of rental dealers across the country. When the trade association was born in 1981, the industry giant was Remco with 50 stores. There were no laws relating to the business and it was rare for rental dealers to disclose either the cash price of the property or the total rental-purchase price to customers in the agreements. Legal aid lawyers sued rental companies occasionally, usually when a customer was provoked. Suits were filed in federal court alleging violations of Truth-In-Lending. The industry won these early cases or it might not have grown like it did.

Curtis Mathes was one of the major TV brands, popular in rental stores, and billed itself as "the most expensive TV in America and darn well worth it." The company hyped its 25-inch console, which was the largest TV available at the time. TVs were the mainstay of the rental business. In some stores, it was the only product. There were no remote controls. VCRs had not been invented yet. Furniture was being rented, but mainly to apartment complexes and not through rental-purchase stores.

Showrooms were tiny by today’s standards, maybe 1,000 to 1,500 square feet. Early stores carried TVs and stereos. Progressive stores might have had a few white goods. The standard rental term was 18 months and the average monthly yield per unit was $60. There was no leased property insurance and no damage waivers. The common wisdom was that if such add-ons were offered, soon a dealer would have no inventory left.There were maybe 400 stores in the entire country, each with an average BOR of 500 units. Rental dealers occasionally swapped stores in those days for four to six times monthly revenues. The weekly/monthly mix was probably more weekly in those days.

There were no personal computers in 1980. Remco had a creaky mainframe in its home office with big spools of tape. Otherwise, there were no computers in any rental stores or home offices. Rental dealers counted payment history cards by hand every Saturday night.

A few visionary dealers saw the industry’s potential even then. Tom Devlin rolled up 300 rental-purchase stores as quickly as he could and went public in 1983. By 1986, Bud Gates was telling people that he intended to be the head of a $1-billion company. It is easy today to wonder who would ever have thought in those early days that a single rental-purchase company would have more than 2,000 stores in the year 2000, but there were some ambitious rental dealers with dreams of empire 20 years ago. Even with these dreamers, it is probably fair to say that few 1980 rental dealers thought that they would still be renting TVs in the year 2000. And only a handful of those 1980 dealers are still at it.

Business as Usual?

What can we expect 20 years from now? Will there still be a viable, healthy rental-purchase industry? The certain prediction is yes. Whatever the economic circumstances of the country over the next 20 years, there are still going to be consumers going through abrupt and unexpected life changes, consumers with short-term needs, consumers who want the flexibility and choices that rental-purchase offers and consumers without credit. This conclusion assumes that traditional retailing will still be around in 20 years and will not have been totally supplanted by e-commerce. In support of this assumption, social commentators have noted lately that shopping in malls and other brick-and-mortar stores, in addition to being a quest for goods and services, is also an important social occasion. People, especially young people, go shopping to see and to be seen. The predication is that even if ecommerce becomes the most efficient means of acquiring goods, consumers will still go out and shop for the social aspects of the undertaking. If that is the case, then rental stores can play an even larger role in American commerce, since the traditional weekly visit to the rental store is often as warm and friendly a social experie nce as rental customers have anywhere except maybe at church or at the backyard barbecue. Rental dealers can watch this trend and profit from it by continually ensuring that customers’ experiences in the store satisfy the socializing aspects of shopping as completely as possible.

The Future is in Electronics

What will the products be? In an age of technological explosion, conjecture about the products of the future may be the most difficult. Furniture probably won’t change much. It hasn’t changed all that much over the past 20 years. The prediction is that people will still be sitting on sofas, sleeping in beds and eating at dinettes 20 years hence. Electronics is another matter altogether, however. In 1980, wholesale volume of consumer electronics in the United States was just under $11 billion. In 1998, the figure was more than $75 billion. Remember that in 1980 there were no VCRs, no DVDs, no MP3s, no cellular phones and no personal computers. Today there are TVs that are 3 inches thick that hang on the wall. They are certain to get flatter still and bigger and rental customers are going to want them, just like everybody else.

Watch for the notion of "cocooning" to expand. American consumers are increasingly finding their entertainment at home. Few people today can afford hundred thousand dollar top-ofthe- line home theater systems, but already in 1998, 20 percent of American households owned a home theater system with an average retail cost of $3,000. Watch for the whole concept of home entertainment to expand with the continued evolution of existing machines and the inventions of new machines to bring all aspects of entertainment and information into consumers’ homes. TVs and VCRs and DVDs and stereos and computers will all get joined together, somehow, and without wires.

Watch for the advent of Internet appliances, which the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association estimates will be how 50 percent of Americans connect to the Internet as early as 2002. It will not be too long before Internet access is as ubiquitous as the telephone is today; it will soon be available literally to everyone on Earth. Watch for personal devices, so small and versatile that people carry them all the time to stay in constant contact with all that is going on in the world. Some, perhaps many, consumers will want to rent them. Whatever technological developments occur for consumers, the rental industry will have the chance to package those products for their rental customers.

Some Things Never Change

What will the rental purchase stores look like in 20 years? Will the superstore concept finally take hold of the rental industry or will e-commerce do away with the need for real stores altogether? Will the industry consolidate itself into one mega-rental chain or will "mom-andpop" operators retain their viability? Rental stores from 20 years ago are still recognizable as rental stores. The windows may be cleaner today, the signage snappier, the interiors larger, the product mix wider, the displays more imaginative, but they are still rental stores. They all still have rental counters and back rooms. The prediction is that rental stores will still be recognizable in the year 2020. After all, Ernie Talley left the business for nearly 30 years and came back and picked it up again fairly well and fairly quickly the second time around. He had to rent and collect in the ’60s. He is renting and collecting in the ’90s; whoever it is that is in the business in 2020 will still have to rent and collect. They will still need rental counters and back rooms.

The Need for Technological Expertise

The technological changes over the next 20 years will be exciting and challenging for the rental industry. Rental dealers will have to keep up, and the changes are occurring so fast that keeping up is not easy and will not get any easier. The industry will have to bring in some technical experts in addition to the good people-oriented employees that the industry hires today. It is going to take more than showing a customer how to click through the channels on a remote to explain and rent the products of tomorrow. Today, teenagers, the rental customers of tomorrow, want computer software that will download MP3 music from the Internet and then play it through their headphones.

The advent of personal computers and how the rental industry handled them over the past 20 years is a useful history to help project how the industry might handle vast technological change over the next 20 years.

The industry was quick to adopt computer technology for business purposes. Computer systems were developed early and at considerable expense to streamline record keeping at the store level and communications with the home office. Early computer systems were expensive and twitchy, but rental dealers embraced the technology and bought the early machines and software and upgraded them and generally were in the vanguard of small business computer development in the country.

Some systems in use today are sophisticated examples of what personal computers can do in and for a company, keeping and manipulating information about the enterprise and providing it quickly to those who can interpret it and affect operations accordingly. Few, if any, rental companies attempt to run the business today without heavy dependence on computer systems.

If the use of personal computers by rental dealers as a business tool is a history of innovation, vision and courage, the story of the rental of personal computers by the industry to customers is less compelling. While there are stores and even companies today with 20 percent of BOR in computers, they are the exceptions, as the industry overall last year had less than 2 percent of BOR in computers. Whole retail industries have sprung up to build, market, install and service personal computers while the rental industry has struggled to figure out how to rent them successfully.

One cannot ignore some lack of demand from traditional rental customers who have not yet placed personal computers on the list of must-have items for the house. But watch. Soon, and it will not take anywhere close to 20 years, everyone will be on the Internet. Rental dealers will have to figure out how to offer this service and the computer or other product that rents along with the service or lose the business to some one else – Internet stores, maybe, that will dot the malls like cellular telephone stores do today. Everybody that is on the Internet today is renting that service. The service companies are just entrepreneurial concerns. They are not regulated industries like the telephone company was for so many years.

Computers, and likely the new generation of Internet appliances, are such eminently rental items. They change rapidly compared to any other product. Owning products that quickly become obsolete is far less preferable to renting those kinds of products. If the entrepreneurial fire keeps burning in the industry, then rental dealers will capture their fair share or more of what is already a huge market and one that is going to get a lot bigger.

Predictions about the future are always chancy and predictors are often wrong. The entrepreneurial drive that has propelled this industry for the past 20 years is a real phenomenon, however, and it is fairly safe to predict that this industry will continue to attract people with this spirit and drive. If that prediction is correct, it is then safe to predict that whatever external changes occur and however rapidly the rental marketplace evolves, rental dealers will move right along with those changes. The business has always been a resilient one, adapting to meet the wants and needs of its customers. It would be hard not to predict that the industry of the future will continue to be as resilient and light on its feet as it has been to date.

 

Non-Compete Agreements: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
By Ed Winn III

As the labor market tightens and competition among rental stores increases, there is a growing trend among rental dealers to require written non-competition agreements as a condition of employment. The prevalence of these agreements can increase the friction between employer and employee, between competing rental companies and, additionally, raises a number of legal issues for all concerned. Who should sign them? What happens if an employee refuses to sign an agreement? Are they enforceable? How does an employer enforce them? How can a rental dealer determine if an applicant has signed one with another company? These are just a few of the questions that non-competition agreements raise. Non-competition agreements are found most often in more comprehensive contracts of employment, but may occasionally be stand-alone documents. Here is how a typical noncompetition clause might read:

"While the Employee is employed by the Company, Employee agrees that he will not engage in any activities that compete with the business of the Company, directly or indirectly. Employee further agrees that for a period of __________ months after the termination of this agreement, with or without cause, he shall not be employed in a management position or own an interest greater than 5 percent in any company or other entity or own or operate a sole proprietorship which engages in the rental of household goods similar to those being rented by Employer at the present time. This covenant not to compete shall be limited to a geographic area equal to a radius of ________ miles from the location where the Employee is working or has worked [from any present location in which Employer presently owns or operates a rental store]."

In addition to this language, there are other contractual provisions that employers use to seek to control post-employment behavior, which are all loosely referred to as noncompetes. Nondisclosure agreements prevent an employee from disclosing an employer’s confidential information, which would include customer lists, to anyone outside the company. As a practical matter, there are state and federal statutes that protect a company’s confidential information and there are criminal statutes prohibiting the theft of trade secrets, which, in most states, would include customer lists.

There are also non-solicitation agreements that prohibit former employees from contacting existing customers to try to lure them to start doing business with a new company. There are also non-raiding agreements which prevent employees from trying to hire former coworkers to come to work for the new company. An employer might ask a new employee to sign some or all of these agreements as a condition of employment.

Will the law uphold your non-compete agreement?

 There can be legal consideration issues if an employer requests existing employees to sign a non-compete agreement. The employee can argue that he did not get anything in exchange for agreeing to the non-compete and contract law provides that consideration must flow both ways for a contract to be enforceable. The employer can argue that the employee is getting continued employment in exchange for signing the non-compete, although in some states, refusing to sign a non-compete may not be grounds for termination. It is safer for employers to have employees sign non-compete agreements when they begin work, when they get a raise, promotion or some other new employment benefit which can then be exchanged for the non-compete.

Rental dealers want employees to sign non-competition agreements to keep them from running off to the competition one day with the company’s secrets and know-how. For midand upper- management employees, such information might include marketing strategies, proposed new store locations, new product lines and other sensitive information that give the company its competitive edge.

At the store level, it is knowledge of the customer base that a dealer wants to protect. It is only through a store manager’s employment in a rental store that the employee learns who the customers are, where they live, how they pay, who the bad customers have been and the habits, generally, of the customer base. In the rental business, that is valuable information. From an employer’s point of view, an employee should never be able to take information learned on the job to a competing company and use it against the company where this information was obtained.

The employer’s interest is in protecting the business and making it as competitive and valuable as possible. In the rental industry, a long-standing store manager could go across the street and a certain number of customers loyal to that manager would follow, assuming products and rental rates were competitive at the new store. In a rental store, there is real value in the relationships built between store employees and the customer base over time, more so, perhaps, than in most other businesses. If Best Buy loses a salesman to a Sears across the street, it is relatively less important to the value of the enterprise than if it happens in the rental industry. Most retail stores remain product oriented. The rental business has always been much more relationship oriented; the employer wants those relationships protected.

The Freedom to Associate Freely

From the employee’s point of view, it would be unfair to require him to change careers every time he changes jobs, which would be the case if non-competes were absolutely enforceable. At the same time, the employee has an interest in being able to pursue freely his employment opportunities wherever and whenever they might arise. The constitution protects an individual’s right to associate freely and, more vaguely, to pursue happiness, which most people would agree includes working at the most fulfilling, best paying job available. Society has an interest in fostering competition that brings the greatest good to the most people at the lowest prices. Competition is fostered when ideas and people as well as goods and services can be exchanged with as few restrictions as possible.

What’s Enforceable and What’s Not

 

The law must grapple with these competing interests when confronted with non-competes. The law in this country, which has been developed to favor competition, generally has been crafted so that non-compete agreements are only enforceable as long as they involve "reasonable" restrictions on an employee’s ability to go to work for another company. What is reasonable depends, unsurprisingly, on the circumstances of the employment. There is a difference in the law, for example, between non-compete agreements entered into by the seller of a business and made a part of the sales transaction and those entered into between an employer and an employee. The former are more enforceable since sellers and buyers have a more equal bargaining position than employers and employees and, finally, employees must be able to make a living in their chosen line of work.

 

In some jurisdictions, employee non-competition agreements are likely not enforceable at all, regardless of consideration issues on public policy grounds. Courts and sometimes legislatures in these states have determined that the interests in personal freedom and free market goals outweigh an employer’s interests in preserving the value of the enterprise by restricting what employees can do after they leave the company. In other jurisdictions, employee non-competition agreements are enforceable as long as they are "reasonable" in terms of the geographic limits and time restrictions placed on the employee. Rental dealers seeking enforceable non-competes need to be careful in considering what is reasonable to protect the business. If they reach too far, courts may declare the non-compete to be unenforceable. Other courts may be willing to restructure an unreasonable agreement to make it reasonable by rewriting the geographic scope or the time limits. State law primarily controls non-compete agreements, but results may vary within a state depending on the district where the action is brought and the views of individual judges.

 

A recent article in Workforce magazine declared employee non-competes unenforceable in California, Montana, North Dakota and Oklahoma and suspect in Connecticut, Minnesota and Illinois.

What’s reasonable?

 

What is reasonable, of course, is often in the eyes of the beholder. When fashioning geographical limits for store employee non-competes, rental dealers need to examine how far the store delivers. In smaller markets, a 25-mile radius might be reasonable if the store is regularly making deliveries that far from the store. In major urban markets, such a restriction may not be enforceable if there are no deliveries beyond a 3- or 5-mile radius. A blanket 25- mile restriction for employees in a multi-unit rental chain has been enforced in some markets and held to be unreasonable in other markets.

Restrictions on time may vary from a little as six months to as much as three to five years. The longer the time, the greater the risk that a court will rule the restriction unreasonable as "too long." A court will look at such factors as age of the store, tenure of the employee with the company and in the store, how long the store has been open and how long customers have been on the books in the store. Six months may be all that an employer can enforce against an employee of a new store. Given the turnover in rental stores, both of employees and customers alike, it is hard to imagine a court enforcing a non-compete beyond 18 to 24 months.

Enforcing a Non-Compete Agreement

 

A rental dealer seeking to enforce a non-compete against a former employee will typically seek an injunction - a direct court order for the employee to comply with a court order or risk being held in contempt of court. An employer might also seek money damages if the breach has been going on for a while and the employer can prove some quantifiable losses. The dealer may also sue the new employer for interfering with contractual relations and conspiracy. One way to reduce litigation is for rental dealers to ask all potential new hires if they have signed or are subject to any non-compete, nonsolicitation or non-raiding agreements with another rental company. Dealers can ask these questions as part of the employment application process. Such questions will at least get the issue on the table and the hiring company will have a chance to determine whether the non-compete in question is reasonable. Then, the hiring company can ask for a waiver, pay some form of consideration for a release or move the new employee outside the territorial restriction area for a period of time.

 

There are still a number of rental companies that do not use non-compete agreements at all. They are aware of the uncertain enforceability of such agreements and the time and expense associated with such enforcement actions. They have concluded that employees will work for companies where they are respected, valued, treated fairly and are well compensated. Some owners have determined that they do not want to deter their employees from being able to improve themselves by taking any job the employee thinks is a better one.

 

 Whatever a given company’s philosophy about non-competes, they are a fact of life in the rental marketplace today. Good employees have always been hard to find and keep. Employees should not be surprised to have the issue arise when interviewing with a new company. They should review the provisions carefully and measure whether the employer’s non-compete demands are reasonable and are something that the employee can live with. If not, the time to negotiate the particulars is when being courted for a job, not when the matter has landed in court for enforcement.

 

 

Workplace Violence: Is it a Real Threat?
By Kent Sutherland

He was a big guy. An ex-professional football player with a perfect, white smile and a heart as big as anyone I ever knew. He was a conscientious husband and father who was driven to succeed and be recognized by his peers as an achiever. His football career was cut short by injury and probably, as he confided to me, a lack of the kind of skill required to succeed in the NFL. By the time he showed up in my management training class, he had achieved a noticeable measure of success as a rising star in the company’s management ranks. But, he made a huge, expensive mistake.

Every rental store manager knows that Saturday morning, if you can get there early enough, is the best time to "catch" some of those non-paying customers who have been dodging every collection attempt. This scenario occurs every Saturday morning in virtually every city, town and hamlet in America as rental store managers send out the troops to bring in the money or the merchandise. They’re successful in most cases because that particular type of customer has learned to wait for the store representative to knock on his door on Saturday morning and collect the payment to renew the rental agreement. He is only too happy to have this doorstep collection service, which most often costs nothing and does not penalize him for failing to honor the signed agreement.

But there is another type of customer. This customer understands the protection of the law better than many people who are paid to collect those payments. This type of customer is looking for the company and its representatives to make a mistake they can use to their own benefit. This type of customer knows human nature dictates a certain posturing attitude when one’s pride is at stake. On this particular Saturday morning, George (as we will call our above- mentioned manager trainee) was just going about his regular routine. Mechanically going from one door to the next collecting those over-due payments from mostly cooperative customers was something he had done many times before. On this Saturday morning, however, he was about to encounter the type of customer who knew how to push the wrong buttons, or the right buttons, depending on your perspective.

 

George approached the apartment residence and noticed two men and a woman standing casually at the door. They were talking and laughing and spoke to him in a friendly enough manner as he approached. When he asked for the customer whose name appeared on his past due printout, one of the men extended his hand as if to greet George. When George stated his business the man quietly informed him that he didn’t have the required sum of cash and stepped back from the door in a gesture that suggested that George enter the residence to recover the rented stereo.

 

As George stepped through the door and went to the stereo to begin disconnecting the components, another woman came running and screaming from a back bedroom, shouting at him to get out of her home. He began to try to explain the situation, but by then the other three had joined the verbal attack. The man he had first spoken to threatened George with bodily harm if he didn’t leave immediately. But, being a conscientious company man, George knew from his short experience that they would probably never see that stereo again. So he ignored all of them and continued the disconnection process.

 

By this time the shouting had drawn a small crowd at the front door and George, sensing that things were getting out of hand, began to take a defensive posture. He informed all of them that he was skilled at self-defense and, if necessary, he was prepared to take the stereo by force. The verbal exchange was cut short by the terrified cries of a young child and the appearance of a baseball bat in the hands of the man who had originally given the impression of being the named customer.

 

When George arrived back at the store, he was still feeling the adrenaline rush and discussed the possibility with the store manager of taking two or three other guys back out to the residence to recover the stereo. While they were discussing this, the police arrived and asked for George. He was handcuffed and taken to jail, charged with unlawful entry of a private residence. Here is a case of someone just doing the job he was paid to do, but who also reached a level of personal pride that ignored the law, company policy and just plain good sense. He lost, big. Although the legal case eventually went nowhere, George was never the same. He became defensive, even combative with difficult customers. Eventually he transitioned out of the company after being transferred to two other stores and never achieving the star status he had shown earlier. His story is familiar to anyone who has worked in a rental-purchase store for any length of time. Eventually you encounter that type of customer who thrives on intimidation.

 

The rental-purchase program of service assumes the customers’ willingness to either renew the rental agreement by making the required payment or agreeing to return the rented product to the company. But every customer has at least 13 clear options when the agreement expires. About half of those options defy all state laws and moral obligations because they are based on the customer’s refusal to honor the signed rental agreement and one way or another keep the rented product without making further payments. Every rental store has a small number of these accounts, which are eventually charged off. These accounts represent the highest risk because this type of customer is usually highly skilled at the fine art of deception. They also represent the highest risk to rental store employees who are paid to collect those accounts or recover the product.

 

The potential for violence or at least the threat of violence is very real. There are rental store employees who have been verbally threatened, pushed, kicked, beaten, kidnapped, robbed and shot. Although these confrontations rarely end up with critically injured employees, every such incident had that potential and some of them ma ybe even had that intention.

Violence in the American Workplace

 

According to the Workplace Violence Research Institute, homicide is now the No. 1 cause of work-related death for women and No. 2 for men. It also represents the No. 1 security threat to all corporations in the United States. In 1997, violence directly affected approximately 600,000 employees, costing them about 1.8 million work days and nearly $60 million in lost wages. Also in 1997, employees killed 166 bosses and coworkers. The primary targets of workplace violence are supervisors and domestic partners. Termination related homicides occur from 5 minutes to 3 years after the termination. The average age of employee aggressors is 38 years. In 37 percent of violent incidents, the assailant immediately committed suicide. More than 75 percent of violent incidents were preceded by warning signs that were ignored. The total cost of workplace violence for 1997 has been estimated at about $38 billion.

 

The Associated Press reported in August 1999 the findings of a new study entitled "The Experience of Anger at Work: Lessons from the Chronically Angry," that nearly one in four employees are "generally, at least somewhat angry at work." According to this study, the primary reason surveyed employees gave for their anger is, "the actions of supervisors or managers."

 

But there is an even more frightening prospect than an angry coworker or ex-employee. According to the latest figures available from the Department of Justice, of the 1,063 workplace homicides in 1993, 43 were committed by customers. Nearly half of the estimated 300,000 workplace violent incidents in 1997 were perpetrated by customers or those posing as customers.

Is Violence a Threat to Rental Store Employees?

 

The obvious answer is "yes." But what is being done throughout the industry to address this threat? While rental dealers are concerned for their employees’ safety and health and probably caution them about certain hazards periodically, more than a casual, occasional cautionary warning is required by federal law and moral obligation.

 

In a July 1996 bulletin, NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health), an OSHA agency, gave the following risk factors for workplace violence:

• Contact with the public
• Exchange of money
• Delivery of passengers, goods or services
• Having a mobile workplace
• Working with unstable or volatile persons
• Working alone or in small numbers
• Working late at night or during early morning hours
• Working in high-crime areas
• Guarding valuable property or possessions
• Working in community-based settings.

 

That list of prime risk factors doesn’t just fit police officers, taxi drivers, security guards and convenience store clerks-it is a perfect description of nearly every rental-purchase store in America. If you are a rental dealer or manager, take a moment to consider the following:

• Who takes your daily receipts to the bank?
• Is there a clear, written process for handling money and assets?
• How many robberies, attempted robberies or other threats of violence has your company experienced in recent memory?
• Are you sure every potentially violent occurrence is properly reported?
• How could those situations have been prevented?
• What are your greatest security weaknesses?
• Do you have a written, no-tolerance polic y regarding violence in your workplace?
• What has been done to train every employee to recognize and prevent violent confrontations or respond to them?
• Does your operations program allow or instruct employees to walk away from threatening situations?

Creating a Safer Workplace

 

Since every rental-purchase store is perfectly described in NIOSH’s list of prime risk factors, maybe the industry as a whole and each rental dealer and rental store manager in particular, should take a new look at the potential danger they face.

 

 

Train all employees to be alert in the store and in the field for people or situations that don’t look or feel right. Anything that appears to be out of place or gives you a bad feeling should probably be viewed with caution. Plan better to ensure more than one person is present in the store as much as possible. Leaving a male or female employee alone in your store in either daytime or night hours is probably an unnecessary risk.

 

As much as possible, eliminate the need to collect money in the field. Find a way to have two employees involved in all field activities. Make multiple bank deposits during the day when your cash drawer reaches a pre-determined cash level. Eliminate the practice of keeping excessive amounts of cash in the store.

 

All bank deposits should be made by management. Train those managers to be especially observant when counting the receipts in the store, leaving the store to go to the bank and when arriving at the bank. They should not routinely make bank deposits at the same time every day or night. You never know who might be watching.

 

Maintain all outside and inside lighting in peak operating condition. A brightly lit exterior and interior has been found to be a powerful deterrent. Teach all employees never to try to be a hero, but comply with whatever demands a robber makes.

 

Immediately report any suspicious or threatening activity to the police. Create and distribute a no tolerance weapons policy for all employees (see sample).

 

Train every store manager in the art of people management and conducting performance counseling and even how to properly terminate an employee. Train every employee to:

• Always walk away from any escalating confrontation, immediately.
• Be prepared for anything when knocking on a stranger’s door.
• Never respond in anger on the phone or in person, especially when they are on the customers’ home turf.
• Never attempt to intimidate a customer just to get a payment or TV.
• Leave the premises immediately if the customer so orders or requests.